In my career as a Performance Coach and Reconditioning Professional, I am always shocked at how often athletes think that they can jump the line and somehow beam themselves to a state of expertise or greatness. 

They don’t necessarily want to do the work or pay the price required to be great.

It seems this phenomenon is getting even more prevalent in life in general because of all the access to high-quality (and many times low-quality!) video and audio coaching living out there on every social media stream. 

People seem to believe these days that they can just watch a video, take a weekend course, or consult an online resource and they become……snap……experienced!

You need only Google how to do something, and there are 10 to 20+ how-to blogs, or videos available on YouTube that you can digest and become knowledgeable in a myriad of interesting topics. 

But you can’t YouTube or Google experience. 

You can’t WordPress a resume. 

You can’t be something you haven’t earned.

If you don’t pay your dues, you will eventually pay a price.

I worked in the National Hockey League where veteran players used to refer to rookies who thought their S-H-I-T didn’t stink as two-year ten-year guys. They would regularly joke about the character of rookies who thought they knew it all, carried themselves with plenty of attitude, and basically felt they were the man long before they had truly paid their dues. 

Paying your dues is a basic tenant of respect and trust in elite sports, and it is the same in the corporate world and life as well.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t aspire to be the best you can be, or shouldn’t have confidence in yourself, or dive in and learn as much as you can every day. In fact, it means exactly that; work hard, learn more, establish a plan and execute it daily, and go from average, to good, to great.

During that process, cultivate great habits, stay humble, respect those who take the time to mentor you, and be thankful for those who help you rise. Recognize that you cannot be great at something unless others who are greater than you take the time to show you the way.

No one does it alone. 

Anyone who tells you they did it alone, they did it all by themselves, is absolutely full of it. All great ideas are iterations of other great ideas, all great achievements are final steps in a long and meandering discovery process. 

There really is no such thing as “overnight success”.

And even when you can make a case that someone leaped rapidly to high achievement there is, generally speaking, always a moment of reckoning when a price is paid in some form for the skipped steps.

A few years ago, my daughter experienced her first sleep-away camp.  I didn’t know what to expect at the time, I hoped it would be an extraordinary experience that would in some way contribute to her growth and development.

To my amazement, she had a great time. It was so much fun that she lamented that she wished she could go back right away!

Even better, she wanted to go back every year, and every year since, it’s been a powerful growth experience.

What was really wonderful at the time though was to see that not only had she had a good time, but she learned some amazing life skills that will truly make a difference in her life for years to come, several of which I have only learned to practice myself most recently!

The first lesson that struck me was not being overcome by “What if?”

Sure, she went in with some trepidation about meeting new people, what if she didn’t fit in, or what if she didn’t know anyone?

But she fully embraced the opportunity.

The day we dropped her off, she simply accepted that she would explore this new experience and see what would come. There were no tears of fear and no clinging to mommy or daddy, just acceptance that what was to come would be a new experience.

The takeaway; “what if?” discussions serve no purpose. At the end of the day, you can’t control everything, so beating yourself up and churning over the possibilities only serves to create stress and discomfort with what is about to come, even if it is not about to come!

If you are going to get stressed, get stressed about what you do know, not about what you don’t know.

The second lesson was that even when you lose or fail in life there is a win or an opportunity that usually comes out of it.

She described a game called “freeze” that they played at the dinner table each night that saw each camper try to outstare the others.

One camper got to shout out “Freeze!” (he/she didn’t have to participate), and then everyone would have to stop moving and the first one to move was the loser.

As the losers, they had to clean up the table after everyone else. But, they also got to be the ones who yelled, “Freeze!” the next day. So losing always led to a little win the next day when you got to be the caller.

Opportunity is often a side effect of failing.

The third lesson was to never think you have won or succeeded until you “know” you’ve won or succeeded.

The camp had a game that campers played on a dock where each person stood at opposite sides of the dock, perched precariously on the balls of their feet while holding a rope between them both. Each had to pull on the rope trying to get the other to somehow fall in the water. 

You would lose if you let go of the rope, or fell in the water.

Well, she learned a hard lesson when she thought her opponent had put her full feet on the dock (against the rules) and as she went to point it out, she lost her balance, and the other person took advantage, sending my daughter into the drink!

Never believe you’ve won until you have solid proof!

The fourth lesson she learned was that sometimes you are going to reach higher than you ever have before, and it’s going to feel scary.

Don’t give up.

Pause, take stock, and keep reaching higher, it’s the only way to go.

She was climbing a climbing wall for the third or fourth time in her life, each time having aborted about halfway into the climb. She was scared but she was also only 5 or 6 years old at the time.

This time, being a little older she had developed a little more hutzpah and was going to give it a shot.

She described to me how she got about half the way up and then wanted to stop. She looked down towards the instructor who encouraged her to keep going. With one over-reaching thought of ringing the bell, she pushed through her fear and kept climbing.

She was so proud to tell me she had rung the bell at the top!

She overcame her fear of the unknown.

Did she grow another inch perhaps?

The last lesson she learned is to reflect on and celebrate each day.

Each evening at dinner the campers had to tell everyone their thorn, rose and bud for the day. 

The thorn was something that hadn’t worked out for them, the rose was something they most enjoyed about the day, and the bud was what they were looking forward to doing tomorrow.

The opportunity to reflect and re-set for each new day is something we should all do every day, it keeps your subconscious focused on the positive, and not so much dwelling on the negative.

Mindset rules so make yours a positive one!

These five simple practices are life-changing, so wonderful she’s experienced them already at camp, but for those a little older it’s never too late to try.

No one teaches you how to intentionally reflect as an act of growth.

For the most part, it’s simply something you do, mostly subconsciously as you navigate each day.

If you’re like most, you followed the process laid out for you at different stages of life.

You went to kindergarten, then grade school, then high school, and then off the higher learning or vocation.

The path was defined, the objectives laid out, the lesson plans constructed, and the outcomes measured and compared.  You passed the grade and moved on, or you did it all over again.

You tried out for the team, or the sport, you followed the practice plan, you did the drills, you learned the plays or the skills, and you played the games, competed, sometimes winning, and sometimes losing.

Winning and losing, getting cut, or riding the bench gave you the feedback.  Is this working, or not? Coaches gave you feedback, you implemented it, or you didn’t.

You followed the rules set out by mom and dad, or you broke them.  You recognized what the consequences would be for your decisions, and you decided they were worth the risk, or not.

You played and created, and explored, and realized what you liked, or didn’t like, and decided if it was what you wanted to keep doing, or stop doing. In some instances you had the choice, in others, you did not.

You got a job, did the training, learned the ropes, figured out the expectations, and you worked the process.  Maybe you moved up the chain, took on more responsibility, got a pay raise, got a promotion, and kept on going.

Or maybe you decided then or later, that working for someone wasn’t your jam. You decided something you knew or created would be worth something to someone else, and you endevoured to build your own business or career.

You built a business plan, or maybe you just winged it!  You added more pieces, more people, more work, more time, and slowly, but surely, your business venture either flourished or folded.

In all of this, there were indeed moments of reflection.  Do I like this, do I not, do I want this, do I not, am I willing, am I not.

But you weren’t likely taught how to intentionally reflect.  

You might have been one of those who simply learned through a measure of experience and insight. But there really isn’t much in the way of a formal education in reflective practice.

What I mean by intentional reflective practice is that you use the idea of past, present, and future in a way that serves you rather than simply occurs around you.

Intentional reflection means that you first recognize where you have come from, and how you have grown (the past), then grounds you in what you are doing now, and why you are doing it (the present), and finally empowers you to visualize a future possibility that inspires you to further growth.

There is no resentment of what has been, simply a recognition of how it has shaped you.

There is no pining for a future state.  No, “once I get there I will be good” statements. No grass is greener. There is simply an ownership of the present, and how you can make the best of it and experience growth in your effort.

The future represents an imaginary possibility, something you are pulled towards like gravity, but not something you are attached to like it must occur.  There is no “there” to get to, instead there is an image to inspire.

The future vision exposes the work you need to do to grow so that you may meet the mark of its demand.

Reflecting with intention means that you own a process, you are conscious and connected, and that you regularly look back for recognition of growth, see yourself now as a clarification of growth, and look forward as an inspiration toward further growth and change.

It’s a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly experience.  

It’s who you are, not what you are.

Try exploring intentional reflective practice:

1 – Recognize yourself and mind the gap – “where have I come from?”

2 – Ask yourself to be present; “Who am I now? Do I see my purpose?”

3 – Inspire yourself; “where do I wish to go, and why do I wish to go there?”

Regularly engage in this internal conversation. Make it a part of you.

When you begin to do this, you will see yourself like you have never seen yourself before.  It might be uncomfortable in the beginning, but over time, you’ll begin to see your life with more clarity.  

You won’t pine for a future state, or regret what has been or is now.

You will be living your life with intention.

In my life as a performance coach I’ve watched Olympic and professional athletes and many executive athletes I’ve supported toil with the concept of life balance.

We are often advised that creating a balanced life is important in establishing good health and well-being.

I believe a lot of the frustration in trying to attain “balance” is in the interpretation of the word.

The term balance conjures a perception of a scale with equal amounts of weight on either side. The word balance is often interpreted in the sense of equality amongst all the competing interests and demands of our lives.

Many may advocate against such a concept, for the notion that we might somehow be able to truly create an equal effort in every area of responsibility in our lives would seem daunting, if not impossible.

Maybe functionally when we speak of balance the perception and expression of the term should be more like the concept of how music is composed.

In music balance is a weighting of the various frequencies of sound or the instrumental arrangement. Certain elements are more pronounced at different times throughout the arrangement, and certain frequencies are more dominant.

There is always a “foundation” or baseline of sound frequency, each element being a part of the overall sound, however for a true piece of music with melody and flow to be expressed, there must be constant change, otherwise we would just have sound, or worse, maybe just noise.

In a video created by David Lindberg presenting the thoughts of Alan Watts, Alan described why your life is not a journey, he describes life using the analogy of a musical arrangement.

“No piece of music is created to arrive at a completion, unlike travel, where one is trying to get somewhere, in music one does not make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were the case the best conductors would be the ones who played the fastest, there would be composers who wrote only finales.”

Music is an analogy for life. 

The marriage between flow and structure in music is really how we should consider balance in life. There need to be consistent relative structures, and there need to be various elements that ebb and flow.

Sometimes in our lives, we will stay close to the original arrangement, and follow our composition, and sometimes we will define a new arrangement or direction based on what we want to achieve. There should be no guilt about the expression or composition of our lives, and certainly no final destination in mind.

There are so many different types of music, each establishes a different mood, energy, or intention.  In just the same manner, our life requires a different mood, energy, or intention given what we wish to accomplish in the moment, and in the future.

The feeling of being out of balance is just like walking into a booming rave in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday morning when you expect to be working on a project, but instead, your head is pounding with the massive weight of the bass vibration. It’s the wrong music, for the wrong moment, and the desired intention.

The idea of life balance is to modify the music of life just like we modify the music for mood.  Don’t play the same music day after day, situation after situation.  Play the music that meets the mark.  Being balanced is playing with the “frequencies” in your life, and ensuring that you are playing the right music at the right time, exploring the full spectrum of what’s possible.

Don’t try to live a balanced life, instead try to better recognize the time for variation, change, and revision.  Reflect more often on where you are, where you have been, and where you wish to go, just like a beautiful piece of music that takes you on a wonderful momentary ride.

Think of balance like a mixing board, and find the frequencies that work to make you stronger, better, and more fulfilled each day.

When I started University back in the 80’s just like everyone else, I was on a mission to follow the program, learn the curriculum, pass the exams and graduate!

Along the way, I knew I was going to experience epic parties, all-nighter study sessions, lack of sleep, sleeping through class, sleeping in class, meeting friends, new relationships, break-ups, F’s, D’s, C’s, B’s and A’s!

It would all likely happen, and I would get through it, and on the other side I would be something, or somebody! 

I would go out and get a job, I would arrive in the real world and off I would go to earning money!

Money! Ya! I would have money, real money!

Not have to collect beer bottles after parties at my residence and bring them to the grocery store for five cents a piece so I could have enough to buy some Kraft dinner, and maybe on a good night, some wieners.

Enough money so I could really afford to go out for dinner, maybe order a good bottle of wine, maybe own a “new” car, and maybe one day own a house instead of renting a dingy apartment.

I believed, as did most of us who enrolled in university, that my raison d’etre was to get a job and make a living! If I made a good living, I would be successful. If I somehow did better than that, well hey, I would be living la vie da loca!

I believed it when I started University, and I still believed it when I graduated. In essence I believed that success would be attained through becoming something.

It’s always been the way, right?

I once read a book where the author described success as the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.

What I have come to realize since graduating university, and immersing myself in a professional life, is that what I do is not who I am.

That actual success is much deeper and more profound than what I do, or what I have accumulated, or who I have been labeled.

I have realized that who I am is much deeper than what I do, and that in order for me to feel as though I am truly on a pathway to success I must be reaching towards my own worthy ideal.

There is no definition of what that is for every person, no mandatory pathway or script. 

Ultimately we are all on a different path and will reach toward our own worthwhile life when it aligns with our spirit and energy.

But there are a few principles worth considering along the way. Ones I wish I knew when I was much younger than today.

Principle number one is that mindset might just be the most important part of living a successful life.

Most of the prevailing research on mindset today resonates around the concept of fixed versus growth mindset.

In essence, in the fixed mindset all the shitty things that happen to us happen for a reason, and most of the time we attribute it to bad circumstances rather than recognizing how our mindset drives how we perceive the experience .

Nothing is bad or good, we just like to label it based on our own personal experiences and bias.

In a growth mindset, everything that happens to us is really just an experience and usually these experiences lead to opportunity.

The problem is that if we spend all our time dwelling on the label we have affixed to that experience, we often miss the opportunities that arise all around it.

A simple example that happens to most of us often enough is just trying to find parking! I see a spot, I drive towards it, and someone else grabs it!

A fixed mindset tells me to blow up! How dare that person take that spot from me! Couldn’t he/she see I was about to take it?

We start blasting the other person, yelling at them and yelling in our own little bubble about all the injustices of the moment. Instead of actually noticing that another spot freed up, just up ahead, and because we were too focused on what just happened to us, we missed it as well!

Opportunity missed!

This is but a simple example, we do this every day with so many other more significant realities like relationship break ups, or job losses. We get transfixed on what happened, rather than focused on where the next opportunity appears.

A growth mindset allows us to see the opportunity, it relieves us of the label, and allows us to simply observe life as it comes at us rather than react to it and become embroiled in it.

The second principle is the  power of consistency.

The power of consistency is simply this; if I apply a reasonable amount of effort towards a task, skill, project or goal, and I do it consistently every day, I will eventually achieve it.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Well it doesn’t end up to be as simple as it should be, as most of us don’t do this very well and as such, we often miss out on achieving a lot of things that we would like to achieve. We give up too soon. We ebb and flow on our effort, on our commitment, or our actual getting it done!

If you want to get good at something, apply the power of consistency!

The third principle lives off the back of the power of consistency. If you want to have a lot of money one day……you have to invest.

Investing money, even just a little money, regularly and consistently in blue chip investments will yield an eventual financial bounty. It’s just an absolute fact.

However, most of us fail to do it early enough, consistently enough, and with a complete commitment to the long-term.

Get rich quick? 

Ya, it happens, it happens to some people who win the lottery in life. But if your approach focuses on how to do that, and you miss the boat on the long-term approach and the application of the power of consistency, well, you will likely never have what you perhaps desire.

Which brings me to the fourth principle; stop focusing on the money!

There are actually three kinds of currency in life:

1 — Money

2 — Time

3 — Energy

We tend to get focused on having as much of the first as we can get. And we unfortunately spend a lot of the other two currencies in our life trying to get it!

Instead, focus on how you use your time and energy most efficiently and effectively. Then the money will come!

We all need to do a “time audit” on our life on a regular basis, I’ve written about this in a previous blog post. Where do I waste time during my day? What actions am I doing that are taking me towards my goals of achieving a worthy ideal, and what actions am I doing that are not?

Time is a very limited resource, we only have so much available to us, and all of us have no real idea when it will run out on us.

So good heavens, let’s not waste time!

Everyone needs to take the time to identify what things we do in life that inspire or recover energy and what things suck energy from our being.

It might be tasks, projects, environments, or even other people in our lives that either, bring energy to us, or they take energy away. Once we know these, we need to work towards removing or minimizing the energy OUT elements, and maximizing the energy IN elements.

When our time is accounted for, and our energy is strong, we can do anything, and money will most certainly accumulate.

The last principle I wish to share is, plan your life! 

Plan it, prepare it, review and revise it, and execute it — don’t be a passenger! And celebrate your life daily! That’s the bonus principle.

Build yourself a 3–5 year plan. What do you want your life to look and feel like in 3–5 years? 

Don’t be afraid to dream big. As Bill Gates purportedly said once, “most of us overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can do in five.”

Now reverse engineer the plan!

What does it need to look like halfway? What does it need to look like in a year?

Now take year one and break it into quarters. What do you need to do in each quarter to help you move towards that vision?

Now break each quarter into weeks and establish what you have to do in week one to get started.

Each week, review what you’ve done, revise the plan, then wake up each day and execute the plan.

Every day, at the end of the day, celebrate what you achieved. Count your wins!

Most of us finished school and thought we’d get a job, and then we’d settle down, have kids, and build a life.

Most of us wake up one day and realize that getting on that boat and passively waiting for it to arrive at port led to an awful lot of disappointment or miss-direction.

You get but one life on this earth, use these principles to make it an amazing adventure. 

These principles work just as well if you’re 21 or 75, just live them!

Have you ever watched the movie “Saving Private Ryan”. 

If you’ve never seen the movie, may I suggest you probably should take the time to watch it, even if the violence in it is too much for you to digest?

The first thirty minutes of the movie and the last 30 minutes of the movie are perhaps the most realistic depiction of war ever made by Hollywood. Steven Spielberg directed an unfortunate and horrifically real masterpiece.

The movie, without giving away all the plot elements, is about a small platoon of soldiers on D-Day who are asked to find the only living brother of four after his brothers have all been killed in recent action.

General Marshall sends orders to save the one living brother to prevent their mother from having to grieve over the loss of all four of her boys. No doubt a noble cause!

At the end of the movie, as the leader of the band of men (played by Tom Hanks) who have finally found Private Ryan (played by a young Matt Damon) is literally passing away, he whispers in Ryan’s ear, “Earn this!” 

You see, at that moment many men had passed away in an all-out effort to save Private Ryan’s life and Hank’s character didn’t want the effort lost on this young man’s conscience.

Watching this movie, you cannot separate yourself from all the unbelievable heartbreak and horrific sense of loss that these men and their families must have suffered during the war, or any war for that matter.

Imagine being with your grade twelve graduating class and within a minute of landing on the beach, all but three of you are left alive! 

Then you must piece together with a whole host of others to create a new class, only for it to slowly but surely be dramatically culled right before your eyes over and over again!

Hanks’ character’s words in that moment of the movie made me think a lot about the concept of earning your life. Something I’ve tried to remind myself of ever since.

You see, so many of us today just seem to believe that our life is a right, and how dare we not be automatically happy as we flow blindly through life collecting all our baubles and trinkets. We somehow expect it should be right, rather than earn the right to have it.

So for me, there are five important tenets of life that allow us to be worthy of our life on this planet.

The first is to work without complaint. 

Most these days again perceive that a job, or even better, a career is a right. 

Unfortunately for a great deal of the population of this world, a job that pays them a reasonable and sustainable wage is something they might only dream of, not expect. 

So if you have one, understand that it is a privilege and that the person you work for, or the person who buys your services has provided you with the privilege of serving them. 

Do your work with all you have, and do it like you know it might not be there tomorrow.

Second is to be gracious and thankful to your parents for bringing you into this world and providing you with a home (that is if they did so, for all those of you who lived tortured lives at home, this one might not be applicable). 

If your parents brought you up with whatever semblance of structure and provision, and they loved you as best they could, you owe them everything you have to honor their effort. They did the best they could as you are, or may likely do with your own children. Any parent knows it is not an easy task, and it doesn’t come with a playbook!

The third is to mentor someone else. 

We all get to summit our own mountains in life not by the sheer effort of ourselves, but by embracing the support and guidance of so many along the way. Without mentorship, we would likely make too many mistakes to ever achieve our summit. As such, it is our responsibility to pay it back and to mentor others so they may likely summit as well.

The fourth is to learn and grow throughout your life. 

Never stop learning, never stop challenging your thought processes, your habits, or your biases. Those who rest easy, those who take the easy route and do the same thing on different days, do not earn the right to prosper or succeed. 

This life we have been given is a blank canvas and we can paint the picture, we can revise the picture, we can add to the picture, and modify it as we see fit until such time as we pass away so we should never be satisfied with its composition.

The last one is to make a contribution to this world. 

When you give, you grow, when you take, you self-limit. Our life on this planet is about our contribution, it is all we can leave, and it is all that can represent what we have accomplished.

There will be people who take advantage of our contributions. There will be those who do not appreciate what we bring. That is not the point. We cannot live through another’s state of mind; we can only be in charge of our own state of mind, which must be driven by a sense of giving, not receiving.

Wake up every day and earn this life you have been given.

There is nothing trivial about the blessing of our life, never rest easy that it has been earned.

In today’s fast paced society time is compressed, work is challenging, and life is stressful.

Waking up each day can sometimes make you feel like you’re at the beginning of an endurance race.

Slamming together your day, chewing and swallowing something of sustinance, if you are a parent, managing to get a few extra people organized, and then launching into the day can be filled with challenges.

Some people are still actually commuting to work in time frames longer than an hour!

If you do the math, two hours of commuting 200 plus days a year is a minimum of ten days of our your life waiting to get to work and get home!

And the air we are breathing on those crammed freeways, subway tunnels, and bus rides is not FRESH!

Or maybe you are one of the many who’ve chosen or been relegated to working from home, finding yourself seated behind a screen for what seems like eternity, only to stand up, and then be pulled into the vortex of your phone!

Ironically the increasing demand of your time from the technical innovations that were supposed to save you time has become exponential.

Constantly at the beck and call of your bosses, colleagues, friends, and even acquaintances with e-mails, texts, messages of every kind even the dreaded Emoji is an essential part of your daily conversations!

Eating in general has become a real nutrition experiment.

Mastering the challenge of acquiring, scoffing, and digesting food that is prepared for you in every imaginable way has become a daily competition, and one you are surely losing.

Food is fuel, and the fuel today is often not digestible without serious consequences.

Oh ya, and in order to squeeze more into your day, you are likely shaving time from sleep.

Sleep is becoming an endangered species of sorts.

Most likely, the first thing you do when you have a deadline, or something you need to accomplish is compromise your sleep.

On top of that, even though sleep is THE most important element of daily recovery, it’s not unusual to pay limited attention to what you sleep in each night, and how you can make sure the quality of your sleeping space is more than adequate.

See that, I just used the word adequate! That is surely not the word I should be using to describe the quality of my sleep space, or my sleep in general.

Sleep should be stellar!

On top of that, society at large has begun to use drugs and other depressants to nudge into sleep. So many people today are addicted to sleep drugs, it has become a serious epidemic.

Add that to the new found love of prescription pain medication because people are literally running their bodies on empty, and experiencing a really nice combination of side effects!

Side effects we don’t even understand the consequences of just yet!

So what should you do you say?

Well here are ten things you can start doing today that will at least make a dent in the downward spiral.

1 — Do a Time and Space Audit

Sit down this week, pick three days in a row, and write down in a journal what you do throughout the day with your time.

What time do you get up, what do you do from the time you get up to the time you are about to go to sleep, what do you do on your commute, what do you do with your day, when do you eat, how often are you on your media devices, etc., etc., etc.

Write it all down. Log it!

Now, what are you going to do about it!

You’re going to sit down with yourself and have a frank conversation about where you are wasting time, and where you are doing things that aren’t contributing to your energy bank, but rather sucking the life out of it!

Useless TV watching

Video game playing

E-mailing

Social media doom scrolling

Talking to people you don’t like

Doing work that isn’t fulfilling

List it all and start purging!

Create your personal schedule, don’t just accept that your life HAS to be the way it is today, you have the power to re-craft it, and make it your own.

2 — Establish a Moratorium on Your Sleep Deprivation

One of the first things out of the gate that you need to do is determine a relatively consistent sleep schedule. Start to establish a time that you WILL go to bed and a time that you WILL wake up. Try to make the time in between consistent as well, and get it as close to 6–8 hours as possible.

You don’t want to be sleep depraved! 

Yes, I said depraved.

3 — Practice Good Sleep Hygiene

Make sure you have a good mattress, pillow, and sheets, and keep them clean!

Go to bed in the dark (shut down all the technology that lights up the room overnight).

Keep your room temperature cool.

Un-plug from digital media at least 30 minutes to an hour before bed.

Just try the above and you will be surprised how much better you sleep.

4 — Drink More Water Than You Think You Should

Basically, most of us are walking around each day either dehydrated, or close to it. Dehydration is one of the big reasons we get tired during the day and it’s also a reason we feel hungry. So drinking water frequently throughout the day reduces fatigue and limits binge eating. Carry a bottle with you so you keep filling it up and emptying it into your tummy regularly!

5 — Take a Break Every Day for at Least 15 Minutes and Do Nothing

Well, you don’t need to do nothing, but the something you do should be refreshing. You can nap, go for a walk, journal, meditate, sit in silence, or read a good book. But don’t go to your social media, don’t answer emails, and don’t spend time watching your favourite TV show. Just take some time for you to be disconnected from the wild world out there, and all the stuff that permeates your existence these days.

6 — Have a Good Conversation

The idea of just sitting face to face with someone and talking about a wonderful topic of interest today is dying. We’re sliding very slowly into the abyss of digital media, and we are losing the art of talking and listening, and learning about all the interesting things on this planet we call mother earth.

Rule of thumb: ask good questions, listen to the answers, and enjoy the time shared with someone else.

7 — Eat More Real Food

Try to eat at least 5–6 meals a week that you actually make from scratch, or someone you know prepares from scratch. Use fresh ingredients, real food, not processed food. This talent is slowly being lost, we are slowly becoming completely disconnected from what we are putting in our mouths.

And we’re getting really, really fat because of it! Or really sick inside.

8 — Take Time When You Eat

To add to the above, when you eat, eat slowly, taste the food, enjoy the food, and connect with what you are eating. Stop scoffing the food down so you can get to the next thing on the agenda, or eating the food while you do five other things, or eat while you are standing, worse, walking!

Sit down, take your time, and just enjoy the meal! You will be surprised how much more you enjoy it, and how much less you actually eat.

Maybe combine it with #6 and you’ve got an amazing connection point in your day.

9 — Do Some Kind of Exercise

You don’t have to go to the gym. You don’t have to win a competition. You don’t have to beat yourself into the ground. Just start moving, please!

Exercise invigorates you, improves the quality of your daily life, reduces stress, and prevents sickness, so how can you ignore all that and not do something, anything!

Going for a walk is enough (a brisk walk for 20 minutes is good enough). Play a recreational sport. Do a yoga video, or a workout video at home. It doesn’t matter, just get out and do something physical every day.

10 — Count Your Wins

At the end of every day, take the time to reflect on what you’ve accomplished, and no matter how small, celebrate the wins.

Counting your wins re-sets your state of mind, sees you complete your day with positive alignment.

Positive alignment at day’s end allows you to sleep better, and sees you rise with a greater sense of happiness the next day.

Try to make a change today in your life, maybe pick one of the ideas I talked about above and implement it, but start slowly incrementally shifting your life and you will see a difference in how you feel.

1- Space/Time audit

2- Moratorium on sleep deprivation

3- Practice good sleep hygiene

4- Drink more water

5- Take a break from life each day

6- Have a good conversation

7- Eat more real food

8- Take your time eating

9- Do some kind of exercise

10-Count your wins every night

I’ve lived a very charmed life when it comes to working with greatness.

When I was a little boy I wanted to be a professional football player. I dreamed of someday putting on a helmet and walking onto a football field and playing in front of thousands of people.

I loved football.

Alas, I wasn’t born with the genes to make me fast and big and measurably capable of playing professional football. Or at least, that is what I have told myself all these years since leaving the game I loved.

Maybe I could have played professional football, but I hadn’t yet learned the valuable lessons that have since marked my life through the incredible experience of training Olympic champions.

After leaving football behind, I decided a life of fixing and building high-performing athletes would be my connection to the world I loved, the world of competitive sport.

The lessons I have learned from these Gold Medal Olympians will serve me for the rest of my life. Each one has left an indelible mark on me, a simple mark of humility.

Each one is completely different. Their personal journeys all have their own expression born from their own perspective and experiences.

They are all impressive in their own light.

These lessons learned I am now sharing in every way possible. I share them in my mentorship of others, I share them with my friends, I share them with my daughter, and now I share them with you.

Be You

Stop trying to be someone else, to live up to someone else’s vision of who you should be, what the public adulation wants you to be, or perhaps your social circle wants you to be.

Just simply be you.

In every one of these champions, I saw them embrace themselves either through their journey or perhaps before I even met them.

Each of them is unique, and each of them makes no apologies for being who they are, nor should each of us.

Just be you.

Fear Not to Overreach

What does it mean to overreach?

Well, it simply means that you can’t rest on what you have accomplished, or where you are now. You most certainly should celebrate and live in the moment, but even so, while you are on this earth, you are meant to explore it and yourself.

To see how you really can grow. Growth is the key to true fulfillment.

If you want to grow, you must overreach, you must go beyond your current state.

Fear not who you can be.

Stop Taking Yourself So Seriously and Enjoy the Ride!

Each of those champions is intense and focused when they need to be, but one of the common threads of them all is that they also know how to be free. 

Free in the moment, free in expressing themselves, and free in exploring the possibilities.

To be truly free, you need to let go. Let go of your ego, and embrace your spirit.

Dance, sing, laugh, float, fly, fall, jump, cry, hug, and flop, just don’t be so serious all the time.

Experience the Mountain

All mountains can be climbed.

It is not the summit that is the point of the climb (nor the gold medal) it is the experience of the climb. 

What you learn, what you see, how it shapes you, how it contributes to your sculpture, the one you are slowly chipping away at for yourself. 

And it is not the end, but simply a station once attained simply meant to prepare you for your next journey.

Embrace Support

None of these people stood at the top of the podium at the Olympic Games without the assistance of so many.

No one achieves anything without embracing a community of support.

That is the key though, embrace your community, respect your community, return the support of your community, and recognize that it is a part of you.

You cannot do it alone.

I have been changed by every one of these fine souls, Alex Bilodeau taught me about passion, Jennifer Heil taught me about work ethic, Mikael Kingsbury taught me about fun, Tessa Virtue taught me about tenacity, and Scott Moir taught me to free my spirit.

They all taught me these lessons and so much more. I have been extremely blessed to have them all pass through my life and contribute to who I am.

But such life lessons are not empowering unless they are shared for the greater good, so I offer them to you the reader as food for thought in your own journey.

Reach for the stars but in so doing, keep your feet firmly connected to the ground as it is the foundation for your every step.

It seems these days, perhaps because there is so much more news, we seem to experience tragedy almost daily. 

In some ways, sadly, we have lost our sensitivity, we have become numb.

Tragedy has unfortunately become the gray noise in the background, things that fill the editorial content calendars of all the 24-hour news desks around the globe; tsunamis, earthquakes, school shootings, wildfires, wars, mass casualty events of every sort.

It’s someone else’s problem.

But it isn’t really, if you are involved.

What does that mean, involved?

Does it mean that you know someone who is experiencing this trauma?

You are related to someone, you knew them once, you’ve met them, or maybe you’ve just heard of them? 

Maybe there’s a kinship, something you’ve done or experienced , just like the person who’s lost everything or been injured.

It makes a difference when you are involved.  It makes you pause.

We are all individuals who seek to differentiate ourselves. Clothes, accessories, material goods, jobs, tattoos, friends, homes, cars, and so much more, these are the symbols of status, but also the symbols of definition and difference.

Who you are, or who you are not.

To be the same as someone else in our minds is to be branded insignificant, so in our quest to be significant, we accumulate and connect with material items and statements of individuality.

But material goods fade, and so in turn require renewed emphasis on the next item of business, a never-ending quest.

However, when we realize that our growth as an individual within a community, and our contribution to that community is the secret sauce of fulfillment, that’s when things get interesting.

This is where many philanthropists get it wrong.

The person who espouses to be giving away so much wealth in order to help the underprivileged is often left empty and filling the void with still more donations.

Ultimately the truth of a philanthropic life is giving back to the community with whom you are connected. Establishing a path of contribution and an alignment with real human connection is the ticket.

The unfettered love of community is the anchor in our lives, at least for those of us fortunate to have a community around us.

Much of this is the centre point of the success of Facebook, where anyone who wants to, can create a community of connection.

Facebook provides the soil for community when used well. But it has also, along with much of social media, created the side effect of isolation.

We are alone in our community instead of truly connected to it. We now live in virtual communities where there is emotional and intellectual connection, but what seems to be missing is the true mutual suffering and success that used to occur in physical communities.

Physical community is the real deal!

When people suffer and succeed together, build and create together, support one another, and take turns doing so, a bond is forged that is empowering. It empowers each individual to reach higher, or to overcome adversities that alone may seem impossible.

That is the power of real community.

As we see these days, when tragedy occurs, the communities where there are deep roots of connection are the ones that somehow find the silver lining of “one for all”.  

It doesn’t replace the lost and injured, but consoles the pain and suffering of the moment, and the moments to come.

We are better when we are part of a community, individual in our character and aspirations, but aligned on our connection and what matters to us all.

They say that not all stress is the same.

The literature provides us with a framework for understanding stress that may serve us, and stress that may deplete us.

Eustress is the positive interpretation of stress; it’s generally associated with being energized, having higher degrees of performance, and motivation to make change, gives us a positive outlook, and helps us overcome challenges and sickness.

Distress is generally associated with a feeling of unpleasantness, hardship, and energy depletion, perceived as beyond our ability to cope, and can lead to physical sickness, disease, and mental/emotional depression.

Sounds like stress is a little out of your control.

On the contrary, although some stress is imposed, and beyond your control, the vast majority of what you interpret as distressful is just that, an interpretation.  

You give it meaning.

And the more you engage in the negative meaning of the stress (effectively defining it as distress), the more it creates further investment in the meaning and the more distressful it becomes.

But, you do have control over its meaning.

Understand that the primary role of your brain and neurological system is to keep you safe.  

Death is not an option your brain wants to consider.

Your brain is being bombarded every moment of every day with literally millions of pieces of information.

Find that hard to believe?  

Just think for a second at all the noises around you at any given moment of the day. Take a second to simply listen.  

Take each sound you hear and for a moment, recognize and connect to each one.

Crazy isn’t it?  

The sound of the fridge running, the wind blowing, the de-humidifier, a dog barking, a car starting.  That’s just a sample of what I heard just during the time I was writing this paragraph!

Your brain has to decide what is worth acknowledging, and what is not.

It manages things so you can cope without you even knowing because if you had to know, you would simply be overwhelmed all the time!

Just think for a minute about the volume of sound at a nightclub.  Your brain recognizes and predicts you are going into a nightclub, and so it begins to manage what you actually acknowledge.  

It might feel loud, but you are soon talking with the person next to you and using other senses to navigate the conversation.  Your brain slowly revises its focus, tunes out the unwanted, and connects with the wanted.

Imagine for a second if a few days later, in the middle of a conversation at breakfast with your friend or family member, sound from your stereo suddenly just started playing at the volume you encountered in the nightclub!

You’d be in shock!  You’d cover your ears, and you’d run to find the volume knob to shut the sound down.  It would be untenable!

Why the difference in reaction?  

Predictive perception.

Your brain is predictive. It needs to operate with a sense of expectation.  What it believes is important now, and what is not important. And the most important stuff is the stuff that might hurt us.

The moment you walk into the bar, your brain has already acknowledged it will be loud, and you will be safe.  It’s expected.

The moment your stereo begins to blare full blast without your permission, that’s not what was predicted, and it’s therefore evaluated as unsafe.

Now, let’s throw a little curve ball at this concept.  

What if you had a really terrible experience at a concert a few years earlier when the sound was just beyond your capacity to adapt, and you were left with tinnitus in your ears for a few months after the concert?

Now, when your friend asks you to go to a nightclub with a live band this Friday night, you begin to feel distressed.  Your brain interprets the potential for loud sounds as threatening, and as such, your neurological system begins to prepare for something in the future that hasn’t happened yet but might cause harm.

You begin to feel anxious as Friday night gets closer, maybe you start to have a headache, or you feel overwhelmed, and fatigued.  As the night comes closer, you feel distressed, and yet you’re not even sure why.  You want to go out for a great evening with a friend, but your brain thinks otherwise.

The interpretation and reaction to sound volume stress has been created by your brain perceiving it as threatening.

Imagine for a second that you add in other life elements that degrade your neurological system’s ability to cope; lack of sleep, dehydration, low blood sugar.  You’re in this state when your friend calls to organize your night out…….and you snap and tell them you aren’t going out, you’re done with partying!

Your friend is perplexed by your reaction, and so are you, but this is what feels right, even though it feels wrong!

Your brain has defined what distress is and it’s fully invested in it.

This is but a simple example of how your neurological system manages information, and how you can and do have the ability to manifest different outcomes.

You can acknowledge that sound makes you nervous, you can prepare yourself for what might lay ahead, redefine your relationship with the information, and create a different outcome.

Once you begin to acknowledge that you give meaning to the information coming into your brain, you can choose to give it meaning that imparts safety, or at least you can choose to be more responsive to the information (considering all the facts like you’re in a nightclub) rather than reactive (it’s loud and unexpected in your house).

I’ve talked about some of these concepts in a different way in earlier blog posts. 

The concept of the story is how we give things meaning. How everything we see and understand is just a form of story, and how once we acknowledge that we’ve created the meaning, and we become aware of that meaning, we can also be accountable for changing the meaning and creating adaptation through new stories that serve.

The more you understand how your stories inform your interpretations, the more you become the owner of your relationship with stress, what is deemed positive, and what is deemed to be negative.

It’s a liberating truth.